This might be a slightly unusual attempt at a prompt, but might draw some appealing unusual options.
The way it goes: Suggest games, ideally the kind that you believe would have relatively broad appeal. Don’t feel bad about downvotes, but do downvote any game that’s suggested if you have heard of it before (Perhaps, give some special treatment if it was literally your game of the year). This rule is meant to encourage people to post the indie darlings that took some unusual attention and discovery to be aware of and appreciate.
If possible, link to the Steam pages for the games in question, so that anyone interested can quickly take a look at screenshots and reviews. And, as a general tip, anything with over 1000 steam reviews probably doesn’t belong here. While I’d recommend that you only suggest one game per post, at the very most limit it to three.
If I am incorrect about downvotes being inconsequential account-wide, say so and it might be possible to work out a different system.
Voices of the Void a free (likely while it’s in pre-alpha) light simulational game about receiving outer space signals and recording them to sell. You use the currency to clean up, upgrade, and decorate your small facility while moving around the Swiss forest valley you’re in to repair and upkeep the satellite dishes that make the operation function.
It sounds very purely simulational, but there are a lot of secrets and interesting signals that are more than signals. It’s also an Unreal engine game, but features a lot of Source engine love, for example the art style is reminiscent of Half-Life 1, all of the sound effects are EXTREMELY Source game nostalgic, and there’s crouch jumping.
Goated game. I enjoyed so much and it has tons of replayablity.
Moonlight Pulse (83 reviews)
Metroidvania with character-switching
This 2D platformer metroidvania has memorable characters and very cool worldbuilding. You switch between characters to match their abilities to the right situations. They live on a living, planet-sized creature and are fighting off the parasites that are slowly killing their creature-planet. You’ll swim through its blood vessels and explore its organs.
It’s not super long—I finished the story in 9 hours. It’s just about the right length to satisfy.
ECHO (2017)! It’s an indie game with AAA-feeling production quality from a tiny Danish studio that sadly went bankrupt after the game only sold a few thousand copies. I played it during lockdown on an old recommendation from MetaFilter and it has since become one of my favorite hidden gem titles.
You play a bounty hunter named En (voiced by Game of Thrones star Rose Leslie) who wakes from hibernation when her spaceship arrives at a legendary artificial planet said to hold the secret to resurrection and eternal life. When she arrives on the surface, she soon discovers that its interior is a vast, abandoned baroque Palace, straight through to the core. As she wanders the infinite halls guided by her witheringly sarcastic AI London (voiced by Nicholas Boulton), she is surprised to find the Palace generates hostile clones of herself that hunt her down and copy her actions in a unique spin on the stealth genre. Gameplay consists of trying to navigate through various beautiful, byzantine concourses, collecting artifacts and unlocking elevators that lead deeper into the secret at the heart of the planet.
You may or may not enjoy this based on how you feel about stealth games with minimalist combat, but for me the challenging adaptive gameplay combined with the evocative score, compelling voice acting, intriguing story, and gorgeous environmental/sound/UI design made this a really nice surprise. (And while the studio might be dead, I’m really hoping the plans to turn it into a movie eventually rise from development hell.)
This is an incredible game I highly recommend, but I had to downvote because rules
When a publisher goes bust, who gets the money from game sales after that point?
Simple premise is basically Minesweeper, but all the puzzles are handcrafted with some neat designs and concepts that will stretch your puzzle solving to the limit. Also importantly, no guessing required to solve and it’s dirt cheap for the amount of hours of puzzles you get!
Piggybacking off of this comment, if you happen to enjoy Minesweeper, I recommend:
No guessing is required to solve any puzzle either, despite some variants seeming completely impossible.
Fun fact: There’s an achievement for stumbling across a level with a conpletely empty starting board, without any spaces being revealed to be mines or non-mines. Yes, that can be solved without guessing.
Fun fact 2: I’d argue there are more than 14 variants.
Magnetic By Nature is a 2D platformer where you are generally using either attract or repel mechanics. I came across this game on the PAX East show floor, and it really wowed me. I may be one of only a few hundred people who ever played it. There’s a bonus chapter, after the credits, that was kind of bullshit, but the 7 or so hours of gameplay before it was fun, challenging, and unique. Initially available for like $15, it’s now down to $1, and it’s a steal at that price.
Quest Master. Mario Maker meets Zelda dungeons, done well. It deserves way more attention than it’s currently getting, and it’s pretty fun with huge potential despite being early access.
This looks rad!
On a similar note I Wanna Maker which is more or less Mario Maker but free and tonnes of developer created and user created levels to play through.
Oh, that is great. I have fond (painful) memories of I Wanna be the Guy, and this seems right up my nostalgia alley.
I like this stuff and I wanted to get either this or Super Dungeon Maker.
But kinda hard to pick a side since they both look like they have overlapping small communities. And games like this, communities are the only reason to play.
Pick Quest Master. The developer is extremely active and responsive to community feedback and requests. There’s even weekly content updates.
Sold.
Cannon Brawl is a unique kind of RTS where it’s sort of like StarCraft meets Worms. You need to expand something like “the creep” from the Zerg in StarCraft in order to build, but you can also destroy the terrain under your opponent like in Worms. I kid you not when I say this has been one of my go-to local multiplayer games for a decade, and it rules.
This is the first comment I’ve found talking about a game I’ve played. Had a lot of fun playing cannon brawl it feels wrong to downvote your comment.
A first person scifi FPS-RPG. Developed in Ukraine. Very unique experience wrapped inside of a concept that’s been done before. High slavjank tolerance required.
Copy Editor: A RegEx Puzzle Game
It’s a word-puzzle game that incrementally teaches you how to use Regular Expressions (RegEx) to find & replace text. Some of the puzzles add silly restraints for you to work around, and the game has charming NPC coworkers that introduce each challenge.
Ah yes, a game that taunts me about my shitty regex-fu.
After a decade, I don’t think I’ll ever remember how to regex without a cheat sheet.
Never heard of it, and sounds awesome, regexes are the sort of things that need lots of practice to be good at, a game seems like a great way to keep the skill alive
Calcium Contract is a boomer shooter with a pretty unique rewind feature. Humorous with old school feels, but for a modern time. It’s a one man project.
Cozy Space Survivors is a short (few hours) cozy survivor-like indie game with pixel graphics. A run is only ten minutes, so it works also for people with not too much time. It is developed by a single person and it is his first release.
I’ve bought so many Survivor games and many are so bad.
This one looks like it’s trying something unique. I’ll take it for a spin.
What are your picks of the genre?
I’ve also tried a whole bunch, my favourite is probably Rogue: Genesia, I really like the challenges and metaprogression over some of the other titles I’ve tried
For my it’s Bone’s Café.
Imagine overcooked but where you kill and use your customers as ingredients and can raise skeletons from the dead to automate as your chefs and servers. It’s overall a very well put together game, especially for one with 240 reviews (total)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1739070/Bones_Cafe/
I haven’t played it couch co-op but the solo play has been really enjoyable
Heretics Fork is a really good deckbuilding tower defense game https://store.steampowered.com/app/2181610/Heretics_Fork/
The hell theme is cool, the cards are interesting as well as the characters you can play and overall just a really high quality game that’s underappreciated.
I also really enjoyed cult of the lamb: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1313140/Cult_of_the_Lamb/
It’s a game where you are a little sheep creature that runs a cult. It’s a mix of a management game and a roguelike since you go on runs to fight the games main bosses and get items to bring back to improve your cult.
Art style kinda reminds me of Klei’s Don’t Starve and is probably one of the most impressive parts of the game
Though this one is more well known. Still, I hadn’t heard of it before so I think sometimes games with even a big following like this one can stay off the radar a bit unless they are truly massive.
Oh wait I forgot my favorite of all. Although idk how popular it is because its not on a standard platform
Starsector: https://fractalsoftworks.com/
This game is incredible. Genuinely like probably the best game I’ve ever played. It simulates an economy fairly accurately (using the different colonies outputs and inputs to determine prices dynamically). In addition to this colonies can be hurt by you or other parties, affecting the prices of items on the market significantly so you can try to make your money on this margin.
There’s space fleet battles with a complex ship modification system. There’s colony management, it has an interesting early game and it keeps your interest as you get further in the game with new challenges.
It is $15 dollars and is technically in early access (which tbh is a steal). Though in practice my experience with it is not remotely reflective of it being early access. It’s a little like how dwarf fortress was in early access (although unlike df before the steam launch there is a frontend that’s really solid).
I also have a bunch more since I was just looking through my steam library so if anybody likes mine I can definitely drop more
Dog Brew is also really good https://store.steampowered.com/app/2883280/Dog_Brew/
It’s a cute game where you are a dog that brews beer. The game isn’t complicated and its pretty short in playtime but it’s $3.50 without a sale and its both cute and fun so I think it’s very worth.
I think this is the only thread where I actually haven’t seen any of the games before.
Another game I enjoyed was The Eternal Castle (remastered). It’s a remake of a game from 1987. The animation is great and the visual style is really cool.
Return Fire was a head-to-head military shooter, with a choice of four different vehicles of destruction, and is played split-screen on PC with one keyboard. I think I only ever had the demo but it was fantastic.
This was the 3DO game.
Gridworld - a simulation game made up of a grid, as the name suggests. You can control the size of the grid, and what spawns in it. The core of the game are these tiny creatures that each take up 1 square. They have varying nodes on them that represent traits and abilities. Under the hood the game says these have to be “wired” correctly by the neural network to make a creature act right. So basically you let this thing run for hours and eventually get little square creatures that eat plants and maybe each other to live.
